Drunken Rages, Bad Deeds: Hedda Won't Be Happy.

In the annals of drawing room theater, few offstage developments are as pivotal to a play's outcome as the party Judge Brack gives for George Tesman in ''Hedda Gabler.'' What the newlywed Hedda learns of the evening Brack has spent with George, her husband, and Eilert Lovborg, her one-time heartthrob, propels the second half of Ibsen's classic 1890 drama. The playwright Sam Marks has devised a fuller account of those debauched hours in ''Brack's Last Bachelor Party,'' at 59E59 Theaters. Though it's an intriguing premise, it might not be needed. Ibsen advanced his larger tale -- about Hedda's eventual suffocation by a social order she despises even as she tries to manipulate it -- through George and Brack's detailed accounts of that night and the visionary manuscript Eilert read from at the party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]